My abdomen is a nightmare. It hurts to breathe, to sit up, to swallow, to cough. My mother carries medical supplies, and a small cake. She places the lot of it on my nightstand, then lifts the blanket from my body.

“First the bad stuff,” she says. “Then the fun! Now undo that robe.”

I untie the cheap robe, fingers fat and clumsy. My stomach is a collision of scars, train tracked, black stitches holding the gashes closed, gnarled caterpillars crawling across my body.

The scent of the secretions floats up off of the wound group. My wounds heal at different paces: Some ooze green, some yellow or clear, others just leak blood.

My mother slathers her fingers in white cream from a long tube.

“Let’s start from the top!” she says.

It is strange to see her this way, the caretaker, the kind one.

She rubs the cream over my wounds, one by one, the pressure of her fingers excruciating, making me squirm in the bed. Small moans crest out of my mouth, wave-like. Her knot brushes against my arm as she leans over me. I stay silent.

“Now,” she says. “How about some cake? It’s like a little party in here!”

She pulls out the vanilla cake. She plunges a fork into frosting.

I let her slide the bite between my lips. I’m just a giant mouth, just lips in a bed.

“WE REALLY SHOULD DO SOMETHING about your face today,” my mother says.

I have grown into the mattress by now, part bed, part woman, the sheets ingrained in my skin.

“What’s wrong with my face?” I ask.

The painkillers make me mean, hot, flashes of fever shot through the body.

“It could just use, I don’t know, something more,” my mother says.

She pulls a bag from behind her back.

“I just brought a few things...” she says.

I don’t have the energy to fight, so I stay where I am, sink deeper into the bed. She smears the flesh color on my face, then the silver over the eyelids.

“Yes, just like that,” she murmurs. “Look how nice, we’re getting somewhere now.”

She traces black liner over my eyelids, blushes my cheeks, then mascara to spider the lashes.

“There, now,” she says, flashing a small mirror at me. “Look how much better you look!”

I STARE AT MY STRANGE NEW SELF, EYES dulled by the pills, face painted bright.

“HOW’S MY GIRL DOING?” COMES MY father’s voice over the phone.

“I’m holding up,” I murmur, alternating between pain and painkiller bliss.

“That’s what your mother says.”

“How are you? I wish you were here.”

“I know, but I’ve had to stick around here. We had to close up the Meat Quarry.”

“What?”

Even under the drugs, the news hurts me.